Career Advice
“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
–Eric Hoffer.
Just finished reading a great book on career management — it’s called A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink. I’ve linked to a great YouTube video that does an excellent job of highlighting some of the concepts in Pink’s book. I highly recommend you pick this book up as it will identify in just under 8 hours an entire blueprint for how to manage your career for the next ten years.
According to Pink, we must deal with three big mega-trends of Abundance, Asia, and Automation. These three trends are forcing traditional job skills out of the limelight and a whole new set of skills is required. Let’s break apart the three trends a little so you get a sense for what I’m talking about:
- Abundance – “for businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique & meaningful.
Example of how “abundance” creates the need for ordinary things to be design with art in mind.
- Asia – “According to Forrester Research, ‘at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the US to countries like India, China and Russia by 2015.”
- Automation – “This century, new technologies are proving that they can replace human left brains. Any job that depends on routines – that can be reduced to a set of rules, or broken down into a set of repeatable steps – is at risk.”
With our world changing so quickly, we must adopt a new way of thinking that utilizes new senses & skills. In the conceptual age (the one that we are now entering, we will need to compliment the logic, reason, and technical abilities of our past with mastery of these six essential apititudes:
- Design – “In a world enriched by abundance but distributed by the automation and outsourcing of white-collar work, everyone, regardless of profession, must cultivate an artist’s sensibility.”
- Story – “When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver with emotional impact.”
- Symphony – “The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.”
- Play – “Humor embodies many of the right brain’s most powerful attributes – the ability to place situations in context, to glimpse the big picture, and to combine differing perspectives into new alignments.”
- Meaning – “Rising prosperity and abundance will allow more people to engage in the pursuit of meaning and as more of us summon the will to do so, meaning will move to the center of our lives and consciousness.”
- Empathy – “Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality – climbing into another’s mind to experience the world from that person’s perspective.”
So what? So as career-minded peolpe, we should not only be preparing ourselves and our kids for the world that is…but the world that will be…
From the YouTube user LiteraryLoser -- a traditional work product.
From the You Tube user, literaryloser - A new way of producing work.
